Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Trailrunner7 writes "The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit has been spearheading botnet takedowns and other anti-cybercrime operations for many years, and it has had remarkable success. But the cybercrime problem isn't going away anytime soon, so the DCU is in the process of building a new cybercrime center here, and soon will roll out a new threat intelligence service to help ISPs and CERT teams get better data about ongoing attacks. Dennis Fisher sat down with TJ Campana, director of security at the DCU, to discuss the unit's work and what threats could be next on the target list."

Or about how they kept the world's population hostage with Clippy the Paperclip? I mean, when they heard Clippy was going to be removed from the next version of Office, around 350 million people upgraded straight away.

Or is it about how Microsoft is paying 500 million (USD, EUR, whatever) in fines every couple of years, in order to keep doing business as a software monopoly? That is probably the most brilliant crime by the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit ever!

But if youre finally at the questions, things go from bad to worse. One would expect a "Digital Crimes Unit" to: - investigate security holes (preferably before shiping it out)
- make sure that virus-makers dont have a chance.
- find, cage and string up the idiot that makes Win8 harder to get rid of than a bad case of Herpes.
- see to it that three-letter-agency's (both US and nonUS) place backdoors in MS software.
- Explosions, romance, fast car's, flashing badges and glu

You don't actually think Microsoft is going around kicking in doors, do you? They're mostly working as a legal presence or as a team of civilian experts assisting law enforcement and everything goes through a judge.

No. Its all about the appearance of being proactive as to minimize their legal liability. Face it, its cheeper than the alturnative.

If they really wanted to 'stop crime' as their top objective they could just make a more secure product, starting by ejecting all the useless legacy code that lets the bad guys win without hardly trying. Its hard to make a secure design starting from a block of swiss cheese. There are more things they could do to make crime harder than I could ever possibly list in this limi

They're not actually doing anything illegal. The situation is like this: the offenders are in plain sight on the internet, they don't bother hiding because there is nobody policing where they're enacting their schemes.

MS is exposing them to authorities basically doing their legwork for them in tracking down these criminals.

They have motivation to do it too, its their systems that are most often affected by these criminals, so they are being uncannily pro-active about it.

Isn't almost every single instance of Android malware a Trojan? In the case of Windows, for years a large percentage was drive-by exploits of IE, ActiveX, and just about every other part of the system.

Can't speek to OS X but Android is so brain damaged as to not look much like Unix/Linux at all.

Actually, Android's security model is much better than the traditional Unix security model. The traditional Unix model is that the program is the user and has the same permission as if the user were manually doing the operation him/herself. This was designed in the 1970s when all users were coders, and makes no sense today when people download untrusted code from the Internet on a regular basis. Android's securi

How come the "Superior UNIX design" that have lead to tens of thousands of +5 Insightful Slashdot posts over the years doesn't protect Android and OS X?

UNIX does nothing to stop the owner of a computer system from wiping out all files by doing su and then rm -rf/ or similar. There are only two ways to stop a device's owner from doing that: education, or taking administrative privileges away from the device's owner.

You mean how they play whack-a-mole with botnets and claim victory when they accidentally hit one, but stay curiously mum when the very same botnet pops up again only two weeks later?

N'mind that they've been criminally lax in improving their software, creating a very easily planted very fertile ground for an entire flora and fauna of malware to grow and prosper in the first place. They created this "ecosystem" on a much grander scale than this "remarkable success" in taking down little pieces of it, for a short while.

Exactly. They walk a very fine line between people complaining that they're locked out of their own computer, and allowing viruses to just run rampant on the system. They could probably make a very secure system, but people would complain too much because all their applications would have to come vetted from MS and it would be like running IOS on your desktop.

They could probably make a very secure system, but people would complain too much because all their applications would have to come vetted from MS and it would be like running IOS on your desktop.

Um...yeah...perhaps you've never heard of 'iOS jailbreaking"? Seriously, even with MS vetted drivers (a mandatory part of 64-bit Windows), almost entirely non-Admin user programs (because of how Windows is designed, there are a handful of MS programs that run at higher privilege to provide the Win32/64 environemnt

As I understand it, people blame Microsoft for adding Secure Boot support to Windows 8 because of what Microsoft did to the companion product Windows RT at the same time. Microsoft forbids manufacturers of devices that ship with Windows RT from allowing the user to disable or otherwise reconfigure Secure Boot. Devices with an x86 CPU MUST allow user configuration of Secure Boot, but devices with an ARM CPU MUST NOT.

Who needs shills when your competition has been diligently chumming the water in which they live for a decade or two? Microsoft has earned its hatred in this industry, one pissed off user at a time. To pretend this entirely predictable reaction is the work of shills only betrays your own allegiance and paid for status...